Theatre <i>&nbsp;</i>

NOISES OFFLYTTELTON, NATIONAL THEATRE,LONDON

NOISES OFFLYTTELTON, NATIONAL THEATRE,LONDON

Noises Off by Michael Frayn has strong claims to be voted the funniest farce ever written. And the brainiest. It is, after all, a farce about a farce - a meta-farce, no less. The play shows us the same company of actors in a ropy seaside-rep farce called Nothing On (a sort of Rookery Nookie romp) from three different, mountingly hilarious perspectives. There is the Act One dress rehearsal, then a reverse-angle view from behind the set, then a front-of-house take on a disastrous public performance. The brilliant trick is that the frenzied feuds, foibles, and cross-purposes of the actors' real lives increasingly upstage the comparatively anaemic cock-ups in Nothing On.

So Frayn's play is triply theatrical, a point made by default in the amusingly dreadful movie version by Peter Bogdanovich which was a contradiction in terms roughly on the level of trying to mount a synchronised swimming display at the local ice-rink. A lot depends, though, on which theatre you see it in. Jeremy Sams's splendidly cast revival in the Lyttelton is undoubtedly a joy and a riot, but through the first half of the evening, I felt that its location, in the temple of Art that is the National Theatre, had a slightly deadening effect on the proceedings. For obvious reasons, Noises Off works best in the tatty gilt and plush raffishness of the commercial sector. In the early stages, the Lyttelton's slightly antiseptic ambience seemed to me to expose a faint lack of balls in Frayn's play, which is not, like some of the best farces, written from the genitals as well from the author's intellectual genius.

Of course, once it really gets going, it wouldn't matter if you performed it in Westminster Abbey during a state funeral: the audience is just helpless. Helping them to be helpless here are some spot-on performances, particularly from Aden Gillett as Garry Lejeune, the smoothie heartthrob thesp. He is complete bliss, flashing desperate attempts at a reassuring smile towards the audience as banisters self-destruct at his touch or vital doors fail to have knobs. I remember the original Michael Blakemore production as having more attack, but the highly skilled company, which includes those delicious actresses Patricia Hodge and Susie Blake, eventually generate just the right feeling of giddily precarious precision, so that you feel, thrillingly, it's not only Nothing On that is inches away from complete catastrophe, but Noises Off, too.

Should such a robustly commercial piece be mounted at the National Theatre, especially as it has just presented Alan Ayckbourn's not dissimilar House/ Garden? The short answer is no. Right now, however, I'm finding it hard to work up the requisite indignation. Instead, I'm busy making out an invoice to the author and the National, billing them for the added meta-theatrical sideshow my wife, my opposite number on The Daily Telegraph and I caused on opening night. Assuming there were two intervals, we raced to the bar like a shot from a gun at the end of the second act, only to be hurled back by outraged officials to the mirth of half the stalls. I reckon 500 quid would do the trick, Michael.